Jeff Jacoby writes in the Boston Globe, Majority rules on climate science?
Excerpts:
Why would so many scientists have relied on models that turned out to be so wrong? The authors propose several plausible explanations — volcanic eruptions? solar irradiation? — but their bottom line is that climate science still has a long way to go: “Ultimately the causes of this inconsistency will only be understood after … waiting to see how global temperature responds over the coming decades.”
That understanding won’t be advanced one millimeter by ideologues who thunder that the “science is settled” and that anyone who challenges the current consensus is no better than a flat-earther or a Holocaust denier. Perhaps all those climate models wouldn’t have been programmed to overpredict global warming if the pressure to conform to the alarmists’ view weren’t so pervasive.
In a classic 1955 lecture on “The Value of Science,” the celebrated physicist (and future Nobel laureate) Richard Feynmann warned that science would be hobbled if it tried to stifle its doubters and skeptics. “If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar…. [D]oubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed.”
Science isn’t settled by majority vote, and invoking “consensus” to shut off debate is authoritarian and anti-scientific. There are always inconvenient truths to challenge what the majority thinks it knows. Ninety-seven percent of experts may be impressed with the emperor’s new clothes. That’s no reason to silence those who insist he’s actually naked.
HKO
A true liberal should be given to pause by the very idea of consensus, esepcially in a scientific realm. He should be given to pause by the preposterous idea of a 97% consensus on just about anything, especially one as complicated and debatable as causes of global climate change. He should be given to pause that political ideology is a better predictor of one’s position on AGW than any depth of knowledge on the subject.
The AGW true believer has become the poster child for ideological blindness posing as commitment to truth, justifying intellectual bullying and the demonization of dissent.
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